Category Archives: CAT_institutions

A recurring theme in recent months in Understanding Society is organizational dysfunction and the organizational causes of technology failure. Helmut Anheier’s volume When Things Go Wrong: Organizational Failures and Breakdowns is highly relevant to this topic, and it makes for very interesting reading. The volume includes contributions by a number of leading scholars in the sociology of organizations.

And yet the volume seems to miss the mark in some important ways. For one thing, it is unduly focused on the question of “mortality” of firms and other organizations. Bankruptcy and organizational death are frequent synonyms for “failure” here. This frame is evident in the summary the introduction offers of existing approaches in the field: organizational aspects, political aspects, cognitive aspects, and structural aspects. All bring us back to the causes of extinction and bankruptcy in a business organization. Further, the approach highlights the importance of internal conflict within an organization as a source of eventual failure. But it gives no insight into the internal structure and workings of the organization itself, the ways in which behavior and internal structure function to systematically produce certain kinds of outcomes that we can identify as dysfunctional.

Significantly, however, dysfunction does not routinely lead to death of a firm. (Seibel’s contribution in the volume raises this possibility, which Seibel refers to as “successful failures“). This is a familiar observation from political science: what looks dysfunctional from the outside may be perfectly well tuned to a different set of interests (for example, in Robert Bates’s account of pricing boards in Africa in Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies). In their introduction to this volume Anheier and Moulton refer to this possibility as a direction for future research: “successful for whom, a failure for whom?” (14).

The volume tends to look at success and failure in terms of profitability and the satisfaction of stakeholders. But we can define dysfunction in a more granular way by linking characteristics of performance to the perceived “purposes and goals” of the organization. A regulatory agency exists in order to effectively project the health and safety of the public. In this kind of case, failure is any outcome in which the agency flagrantly and avoidably fails to prevent a serious harm — release of radioactive material, contamination of food, a building fire resulting from defects that should have been detected by inspection. If it fails to do so as well as it might then it is dysfunctional.

Why do dysfunctions persist in organizations? It is possible to identify several possible causes. The first is that a dysfunction from one point of view may well be a desirable feature from another point of view. The lack of an authoritative safety officer in a chemical plant may be thought to be dysfunctional if we are thinking about the safety of workers and the public as a primary goal of the plant (link). But if profitability and cost-savings are the primary goals from the point of view of the stakeholders, then the cost-benefit analysis may favor the lack of the safety officer.

Second, there may be internal failures within an organization that are beyond the reach of any executive or manager who might want to correct them. The complexity and loose-coupling of large organizations militate against house cleaning on a large scale.

Third, there may be powerful factions within an organization for whom the “dysfunctional” feature is an important component of their own set of purposes and goals. Fligstein and McAdam argue for this kind of disaggregation with their theory of strategic action fields (link). By disaggregating purposes and goals to the various actors who figure in the life cycle of the organization – founders, stakeholders, executives, managers, experts, frontline workers, labor organizers – it is possible to see the organization as a whole as simply the aggregation of the multiple actions and purposes of the actors within and adjacent to the organization. This aggregation does not imply that the organization is carefully adjusted to serve the public good or to maximize efficiency or to protect the health and safety of the public. Rather, it suggests that the resultant organizational structure serves the interests of the various actors to the fullest extent each actor is able to manage.

Consider the account offered by Thomas Misa of the decline of the steel industry in the United States in the first part of the twentieth century in A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865-1925. Misa’s account seems to point to a massive dysfunction in the steel corporations of the inter-war period, a deliberate and sustained failure to invest in research on new steel technologies in metallurgy and production. Misa argues that the great steel corporations — US Steel in particular — failed to remain competitive in their industry in the early years of the twentieth century because management persistently pursued short-term profits and financial advantage for the company through domination of the market at the expense of research and development. It relied on market domination instead of research and development for its source of revenue and profits.

In short, U.S. Steel was big but not illegal. Its price leadership resulted from its complete dominance in the core markets for steel…. Indeed, many steelmakers had grown comfortable with U.S. Steel’s overriding policy of price and technical stability, which permitted them to create or develop markets where the combine chose not to compete, and they testified to the court in favor of the combine. The real price of stability … was the stifling of technological innovation. (255)

The result was that the modernized steel industries in Europe leap-frogged the previous US advantage and eventually led to unviable production technology in the United States.

At the periphery of the newest and most promising alloy steels, dismissive of continuous-sheet rolling, actively hostile to new structural shapes, a price leader but not a technical leader: this was U.S. Steel. What was the company doing with technological innovation? (257)

Misa is interested in arriving at a better way of understanding the imperatives leading to technical change — better than neoclassical economics and labor history. His solution highlights the changing relationships that developed between industrial consumers and producers in the steel industry.

We now possess a series of powerful insights into the dynamics of technology and social change. Together, these insights offer the realistic promise of being better able, if we choose, to modulate the complex process of technical change. We can now locate the range of sites for technical decision making, including private companies, trade organizations, engineering societies, and government agencies. We can suggest a typology of user-producer interactions, including centralized, multicentered, decentralized, and direct-consumer interactions, that will enable certain kinds of actions while constraining others. We can even suggest a range of activities that are likely to effect technical change, including standards setting, building and zoning codes, and government procurement. Furthermore, we can also suggest a range of strategies by which citizens supposedly on the “outside” may be able to influence decisions supposedly made on the “inside” about technical change, including credibility pressure, forced technology choice, and regulatory issues. (277-278)

In fact Misa places the dynamic of relationship between producer and large consumer at the center of the imperatives towards technological innovation:

In retrospect, what was wrong with U.S. Steel was not its size or even its market power but its policy of isolating itself from the new demands from users that might have spurred technical change. The resulting technological torpidity that doomed the industry was not primarily a matter of industrial concentration, outrageous behavior on the part of white- and blue-collar employees, or even dysfunctional relations among management, labor, and government. What went wrong was the industry’s relations with its consumers. (278)

This relative “callous treatment of consumers” was profoundly harmful when international competition gave large industrial users of steel a choice. When US Steel had market dominance, large industrial users had little choice; but this situation changed after WWII. “This favorable balance of trade eroded during the 1950s as German and Japanese steelmakers rebuilt their bombed-out plants with a new production technology, the basic oxygen furnace (BOF), which American steelmakers had dismissed as unproven and unworkable” (279). Misa quotes a president of a small steel producer: “The Big Steel companies tend to resist new technologies as long as they can … They only accept a new technology when they need it to survive” (280).

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Here is an interesting table from Misa’s book that sheds light on some of the economic and political history in the United States since the post-war period, leading right up to the populist politics of 2016 in the Midwest. This chart provides mute testimony to the decline of the rustbelt industrial cities. Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and western New York account for 83% of the steel production on this table. When American producers lost the competitive battle for steel production in the 1980s, the Rustbelt suffered disproportionately, and eventually blue collar workers lost their places in the affluent economy.

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I am currently writing a book on the topic of the “social ontology of government”. My goal is to provide a short treatment of the social mechanisms and entities that constitute the workings of government. The book will ask some important basic questions: what kind of thing is “government”? (I suggest it is an agglomeration of organizations, social networks, and rules and practices, with no overriding unity.) What does government do? (I simplify and suggest that governments create the conditions of social order and formulate policies and rules aimed at bringing about various social priorities that have been selected through the governmental process.) How does government work — what do we know about the social and institutional processes that constitute its metabolism? (How do government entities make decisions, gather needed information, and enforce the policies they construct?)

In my treatment of the topic of the workings of government I treat the idea of “dysfunction” with the same seriousness as I do topics concerning the effective and functional aspects of governmental action. Examples of dysfunctions include principal-agent problems, conflict of interest, loose coupling of agencies, corruption, bribery, and the corrosive influence of powerful outsiders. It is interesting to me that this topic — ontology of government — has unexpectedly crossed over with another of my interests, the organizational causes of largescale accidents.

In light of these interests, I find the front page of the New York Times on March 28, 2019 to be a truly fascinating amalgam of the social ontology of government, with a heavy dose of dysfunction. Every story on the front page highlights one feature or another of the workings and failures of government. Let’s briefly name these features. (The item numbers flow roughly from upper right to lower left.)

Item 1 is the latest installment of the Boeing 737 MAX story. Failures of regulation and a growing regime of “collaborative regulation” in which the FAA delegates much of the work of certification of aircraft safety to the manufacturer appear at this early stage to be a part of the explanation of this systems failure. This was the topic of a recent post (link).

Items 2 and 3 feature the processes and consequences of failed government — the social crisis in Venezuela created in part by the breakdown of legitimate government, and the fundamental and continuing inability of the British government and its prime minister to arrive at a rational and acceptable policy on an issue of the greatest importance for the country. Given that decision-making and effective administration of law are fundamental functions of government, these two examples are key contributions to the ontology of government. The Brexit story also highlights the dysfunctions that flow from the shameful self-dealing of politicians and leaders who privilege their own political interests over the public good. Boris Johnson, this one’s for you!

Item 4 turns us to the dynamics of presidential political competition. This item falls on the favorable side of the ledger, illustrating the important role that a strong independent press has in helping to inform the public about the past performance and behavior of candidates for high office. It is an important example of depth journalism and provides the public with accurate, nuanced information about an appealing candidate with a policy history as mayor that many may find unpalatable. The story also highlights the role that non-governmental organizations have in politics and government action, in this instance the ACLU.

Item 5 brings us inside the White House and gives the reader a look at the dynamics and mechanisms through which a small circle of presidential advisors are able to determine a particular approach to a policy issue that they favor. It displays the vulnerability the office of president shows to the privileged insiders’ advice concerning policies they personally favor. Whether it is Mick Mulvaney, acting chief of staff to the current president, or Robert McNamara’s advice to JFK and LBJ leading to escalation in Vietnam, the process permits ideologically committed insiders to wield extraordinary policy power.

Item 6 turns to the legislative process, this time in the New Jersey legislature, on the topic of the legalization of marijuana. This story too falls on the positive side of the “function-dysfunction” spectrum, in that it describes a fairly rational and publicly visible process of fact-gathering and policy assessment by a number of New Jersey legislators, leading to the withdrawal of the legislation.

Item 7 turns to the mechanisms of private influence on government, in a particularly unsavory but revealing way. The story reveals details of a high-end dinner “to pa tribute to the guest of honor, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.” The article writes, “Lobbyists told their clients that the event would be a good thing to go to”, at a minimum ticket price of $25,000 per couple. This story connects the dots between private interest and efforts to influence governmental policy. In this case the dots are not very far apart.

With a little effort all these items could be mapped onto the diagram of the interconnections within and across government and external social groups provided above.

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Readers may be skeptical about the practical importance of the topic of nuclear power plant siting decisions, since very few new nuclear plants have been proposed or approved in the United States for decades. However, the topic is one for which there is an extensive historical record, and it is a process that illuminates the challenge for government to balance risk and benefit, private gain and public cost. Moreover, siting inherently brings up issues that are both of concern to the public in general (throughout a state or region of the country) and to the citizens who live in close proximity to the recommended site. The NIMBY problem is unavoidable — it is someone’s backyard, and it is a worrisome neighbor. So this is a good case in terms of which to think creatively about the responsibilities of government for ensuring the public good in the face of risky private activity, and the detailed institutions of regulation and oversight that would work to make wise public outcomes more likely.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about technology failure, government regulation, and risky technologies, and there is a lot to learn about these subjects by looking at the history of nuclear power in the United States. Two books in particular have been interesting to me. Neither is particularly recent, but both shed valuable light on the public-policy context of nuclear decision-making. The first is Joan Aron’s account of the processes that led to the cancellation of the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island in the 1970s (Licensed To Kill?: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Shoreham Power Plant) and the second is Donald Stever, Jr.’s account of the licensing process for the Seabrook nuclear power plant in Seabrook and The Nuclear Regulatory Commission: The Licensing of a Nuclear Power Plant. Both are fascinating books and well worthy of study as a window into government decision-making and regulation. Stever’s book is especially interesting because it is a highly capable analysis of the licensing process, both at the state level and at the level of the NRC, and because Stever himself was a participant. As an assistant attorney general in New Hampshire he was assigned the role of Counsel for the Public throughout the process in New Hampshire.

Joan Aron’s 1997 book Licensed to Kill? is a detailed case study the effort to establish the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island in the 1980s. LILCO had proposed the plant to respond to rising demand for electricity on Long Island as population and energy use rose. And Long Island is a long, narrow island on which traffic congestion at certain times of day is legendary. Evacuation planning was both crucial and in the end, perhaps impossible.

This is an intriguing story, because it led eventually to the cancellation of the operating license for the plant by the NRC after completion of the plant. And the cancellation resulted largely from the effectiveness of public opposition and interest-group political pressure. Aron provides a detailed account of the decisions made by the public utility company LILCO, the AEC and NRC, New York state and local authorities, and citizen activist groups that led to the costliest failed investment in the history of nuclear power in the United States.

In 1991 the NRC made the decision to rescind the operating license for the Shoreham plant, after completion at a cost of over $5 billion but before it had generated a kilowatt of electricity.

Aron’s basic finding is that the project collapsed in costly fiasco because of a loss of trust among the diverse stakeholders: LILCO, the Long Island public, state and local agencies and officials, scientific experts, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Long Island tabloid Newsday played a role as well, sensationalizing every step of the process and contributing to public distrust of the process. Aron finds that the NRC and LILCO underestimated the need for full analysis of safety and emergency preparedness issues raised by the plant’s design, including the issue of evacuation from a largely inaccessible island full of two million people in the event of disaster. LILCO’s decision to upscale the capacity of the plant in the middle of the process contributed to the failure as well. And the occurrence of the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 gave new urgency to the concerns experienced by citizens living within fifty miles of the Shoreham site about the risks of a nuclear plant.

As we have seen, Shoreham failed to operate because of intense public opposition, in which the governor played a key role, inspired in part by the utility’s management incompetence and distrust of the NRC. Inefficiencies in the NRC licensing process were largely irrelevant to the outcome. The public by and large ignored NRC’s findings and took the nonsafety of the plant for granted. (131)

The most influential issue was public safety: would it be possible to perform an orderly evacuation of the population near the plant in the event of a serious emergency? Clarke and Perrow (included in Helmut Anheier, ed., When Things Go Wrong: Organizational Failures and Breakdowns) provide an extensive analysis of the failures that occurred during tests of the emergency evacuation plan designed by LILCO. As they demonstrate, the errors that occurred during the evacuation test were both “normal” and potentially deadly.

One thing that comes out of both books is the fact that the commissioning and regulatory processes are far from ideal examples of the rational development of sound public policy. Rather, business interests, institutional shortcomings, lack of procedural knowledge by committee chairs, and dozens of other factors lead to outcomes that appear to fall far short of what the public needs. But in addition to ordinary intrusions into otherwise rational policy deliberations, there are other reasons to believe that decision-making is more complicated and less rational than a simple model of rational public policy formation would suggest. Every decision-maker brings a set of “framing assumptions” about the reality concerning which he or she is deliberating. These framing assumptions impose an unavoidable kind of cognitive bias into collective decision-making. A business executive brings a worldview to the question of regulation of risk that is quite different from that of an ecologist or an environmental activist. This is different from the point often made about self-interest; our framing assumptions do not feel like expressions of self-interest, but rather simply secure convictions about how the world works and what is important in the world. This is one reason why the work of social scientists like Scott Page (The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies) on the value of diversity in problem-solving and decision-making is so important: by bringing multiple perspectives and cognitive frames to a problem, we are more likely to get a balanced decision that gives appropriate weight to the legitimate interests and concerns of all involved.

Here is an interesting concrete illustration of cognitive bias (with a generous measure of self-interest as well) in Stever’s discussion of siting decisions for nuclear power plants:

From the time a utility makes the critical in-house decision to choose a site, any further study of alternatives is necessarily negative in approach. Once sufficient corporate assets have been sunk into the chosen site to produce data adequate for state site review, the company’s management has a large enough stake in it to resist suggestions that a full study of site alternatives be undertaken as a part of the state (or for that matter as a part of the NEPA) review process. hence, the company’s methodological approach to evaluating alternates to the chosen site will always be oriented toward the desired conclusion that the chosen site is superior. (Stever 1980 : 30)

This is the bias of sunk costs, both inside the organization and in the cognitive frames of independent decision makers in state agencies.

Stever’s central point here is a very important one: the pace of site selection favors the energy company’s choices over the concerns and preferences of affected groups because the company is in a position to have dedicated substantial resources to development of the preferred site proposal. Likewise, scientific experts have a difficult time making their concerns about habitat or traffic flow heard in the context.

But here is a crucial thing to observe: the siting decision is only one of dozens in the development of a new power plant, which is itself only one of hundreds of government / business decisions made every year. What Stever describes is a structural bias in the regulatory process, not a one-off flaw. At its bottom, this is the task that government faces when considering the creation of a new nuclear power plant: “to assess the various public and private costs and benefits of a site proposed by a utility” (32); and Stever’s analysis makes it doubtful that existing public processes do this in a consistent and effective way. Stever argues that government needs to have more of a role in site selection, not less, as pro-market advocates demand: “The kind of social and environmental cost accounting required for a balanced initial assessment of, and development of, alternative sites should be done by a public body acting not as a reviewer of private choices, but as an active planner” (32).

Notice how this scheme shifts the pace and process from the company to the relevant state agency. The preliminary site selection and screening is done by a state site planning agency, with input then invited from the utilities companies, interest groups, and a formal environmental assessment. This places the power squarely in the hands of the government agency rather than the private owner of the plant — reflecting the overriding interest the public has in ensuring health, safety, and environmental controls.

Stever closes a chapter on regulatory issues with these cogent recommendations (38-39):

Electric utility companies should not be responsible for decisions concerning early nuclear-site planning.

Early site identification, evaluation, and inventorying is a public responsibility that should be undertaken by a public agency, with formal participation by utilities and interest groups, based upon criteria developed by the state legislature.

Prior to the use of a particular site, the state should prepare a complete environmental assessment for it, and hold adjudicatory hearings on contested issues.

Further effort should be made toward assessing the public risk of nuclear power plant sites.

In areas like New England, characterized by geographically small states and high energy demand, serious efforts should be made to develop regional site planning and evaluation.

Nuclear licensing reform should focus on the quality of decision-making.

There should be a continued federal presence in nuclear site selection, and the resolution of environmental problems should not be delegated entirely to the states.

(It is very interesting to me that I have not been able to locate a full organizational study of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself.)

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Suppose we are willing to take seriously the idea that organizations possess a kind of intentionality — beliefs, goals, and purposive actions — and suppose that we believe that the microfoundations of these quasi-intentional states depend on the workings of individual purposive actors within specific sets of relations, incentives, and practices. How does the resulting form of “bureaucratic intelligence” compare with human thought and action?

There is a major set of differences between organizational “intelligence” and human intelligence that turn on the unity of human action compared to the fundamental disunity of organizational action. An individual human being gathers a set of beliefs about a situation, reflects on a range of possible actions, and chooses a line of action designed to bring about his/her goals. An organization is disjointed in each of these activities. The belief-setting part of an organization usually consists of multiple separate processes culminating in an amalgamated set of beliefs or representations. And this amalgamation often reflects deep differences in perspective and method across various sub-departments. (Consider inputs into an international crisis incorporating assessments from intelligence, military, and trade specialists.)

Second, individual intentionality possess a substantial degree of practical autonomy. The individual assesses and adopts the set of beliefs that seem best to him or her in current circumstances. The organization in its belief-acquisition is subject to conflicting interests, both internal and external, that bias the belief set in one direction or the other. (This is the central thrust of experts on science policy like Naomi Oreskes.) The organization is not autonomous in its belief formation processes.

Third, an individual’s actions have a reasonable level of consistency and coherence over time. The individual seeks to avoid being self-defeating by doing X and Y while knowing that X undercuts Y. An organization is entirely capable of pursuing a suite of actions which embody exactly this kind of inconsistency, precisely because the actions chosen are the result of multiple disagreeing sub-agencies and officers.

Fourth, we have some reason to expect a degree of stability in the goals and values that underlie actions by an individual. But organizations, exactly because their behavior is a joint product of sub-agents with conflicting plans and goals, are entirely capable of rapid change of goals and values. Deepening this instability is the fluctuating powers and interests of external stakeholders who apply pressure for different values and goals over time.

Finally, human thinkers are potentially epistemic thinkers — they are at least potentially capable of following disciplines of analysis, reasoning, and evidence in their practical engagement with the world. By contrast, because of the influence of interests, both internal and external, organizations are perpetually subject to the distortion of belief, intention, and implementation by actors who have an interest in the outcome of the project. And organizations have little ability to apply rational rational standards to their processes of belief, intention, and implementation formation. Organizational intentionality lacks overriding rational control.

Consider more briefly the topic of action. Human actors suffer various deficiencies of performance when it comes to purposive action, including weakness of the will and self deception. But organizations are altogether less capable of effectively mounting the steps needed to fully implement a plan or a complicated policy or action. This is because of the looseness of linkages that exist between executive and agent within an organization, the perennial possibility of principal-agent problems, and the potential interference with performance created by interested parties outside the organization.

This line of thought suggests that organizational lack “unity of apperception and intention”. There are multiple levels and zones of intention formation, and much of this plurality persists throughout real processes of organizational thinking. And this disunity affects both belief, intention and action. Organizations are not univocal at any point. Belief formation, intention formation, and action remain fragmented and multivocal.

These observations are somewhat parallel to the paradoxes of social choice and various voting systems governing a social choice function. Kenneth Arrow demonstrated it is impossible to design a voting system that guarantees consistency of choice by a group of individual consistency voters. The analogy here is the idea that there is no organizational design possible that guarantees a high degree of consistency and rationality in large organizational decision processes at any stage of quasi-intentionality, including belief acquisition, policy formulation, and policy implementation.

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When we discuss the ontology of various aspects of the social world, we are often thinking of such things as institutions, organizations, social networks, value systems, and the like. These examples pick out features of the world that are relatively stable and functional. Where does an imperfection or dysfunction of social life like corruption fit into our social ontology?

We might say that “corruption” is a descriptive category that is aimed at capturing a particular range of behavior, like stealing, gossiping, or asceticism. This makes corruption a kind of individual behavior, or even a characteristic of some individuals. “Mayor X is corrupt.”

This initial effort does not seem satisfactory, however. The idea of corruption is tied to institutions, roles, and rules in a very direct way, and therefore we cannot really present the concept accurately without articulating these institutional features of the concept of corruption. Corruption might be paraphrased in these terms:

Individual X plays a role Y in institution Z; role Y prescribes honest and impersonal performance of duties; individual X accepts private benefits to take actions that are contrary to the prescriptions of Y. In virtue of these facts X behaves corruptly.

Corruption, then, involves actions taken by officials that deviate from the rules governing their role, in order to receive private benefits from the subjects of those actions. Absent the rules and role, corruption cannot exist. So corruption is a feature that presupposes certain social facts about institutions. (Perhaps there is a link to Searle’s social ontology here; link.)

We might consider that corruption is analogous to friction in physical systems. Friction is a factor that affects the performance of virtually all mechanical systems, but that is a second-order factor within classical mechanics. And it is possible to give mechanical explanations of the ubiquity of friction, in terms of the geometry of adjoining physical surfaces, the strength of inter-molecular attractions, and the like. Analogously, we can offer theories of the frequency with which corruption occurs in organizations, public and private, in terms of the interests and decision-making frameworks of variously situated actors (e.g. real estate developers, land value assessors, tax assessors, zoning authorities …). Developers have a business interest in favorable rulings from assessors and zoning authorities; some officials have an interest in accepting gifts and favors to increase personal income and wealth; each makes an estimate of the likelihood of detection and punishment; and a certain rate of corrupt exchanges is the result.

This line of thought once again makes corruption a feature of the actors and their calculations. But it is important to note that organizations themselves have features that make corrupt exchanges either more likely or less likely (link, link). Some organizations are corruption-resistant in ways in which others are corruption-neutral or corruption-enhancing. These features include internal accounting and auditing procedures; whistle-blowing practices; executive and supervisor vigilance; and other organizational features. Further, governments and systems of law can make arrangements that discourage corruption; the incidence of corruption is influenced by public policy. For example, legal requirements on transparency in financial practices by firms, investment in investigatory resources in oversight agencies, and weighty penalties to companies found guilty of corrupt practices can affect the incidence of corruption. (Robert Klitgaard’s treatment of corruption is relevant here; he provides careful analysis of some of the institutional and governmental measures that can be taken that discourage corrupt practices; link, link. And there are cross-country indices of corruption (e.g. Transparency International) that demonstrate the causal effectiveness of anti-corruption measures at the state level. Finland, Norway, and Switzerland rank well on the Transparency International index.)

So — is corruption a thing? Does corruption need to be included in a social ontology? Does a realist ontology of government and business organization have a place for corruption? Yes, yes, and yes. Corruption is a real property of individual actors’ behavior, observable in social life. It is a consequence of strategic rationality by various actors. Corruption is a social practice with its own supporting or inhibiting culture. Some organizations effectively espouse a core set of values of honesty and correct performance that make corruption less frequent. And corruption is a feature of the design of an organization or bureau, analogous to “mean-time-between-failure” as a feature of a mechanical design. Organizations can adopt institutional protections and cultural commitments that minimize corrupt behavior, while other organizations fail to do so and thereby encourage corrupt behavior. So “corruption-vulnerability” is a real feature of organizations and corruption has a social reality.

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An ongoing thread of posts here is concerned with organizational causes of large technology failures. The driving idea is that failures, accidents, and disasters usually have a dimension of organizational causation behind them. The corporation, research office, shop floor, supervisory system, intra-organizational information flow, and other social elements often play a key role in the occurrence of a gas plant fire, a nuclear power plant malfunction, or a military disaster. There is a tendency to look first and foremost for one or more individuals who made a mistake in order to explain the occurrence of an accident or technology failure; but researchers such as Perrow, Vaughan, Tierney, and Hopkins have demonstrated in detail the importance of broadening the lens to seek out the social and organizational background of an accident.

It seems important to distinguish between system flaws and organizational dysfunction in considering all of the kinds of accidents mentioned here. We might specify system safety along these lines. Any complex process has the potential for malfunction. Good system design means creating a flow of events and processes that make accidents inherently less likely. Part of the task of the designer and engineer is to identify chief sources of harm inherent in the process — release of energy, contamination of food or drugs, unplanned fission in a nuclear plant — and design fail-safe processes so that these events are as unlikely as possible. Further, given the complexity of contemporary technology systems it is critical to attempt to anticipate unintended interactions among subsystems — each of which is functioning correctly but that lead to disaster in unusual but possible interaction scenarios.

In a nuclear processing plant, for example, there is the hazard of radioactive materials being brought into proximity with each other in a way that creates unintended critical mass. Jim Mahaffey’s Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima offers numerous examples of such unintended events, from the careless handling of plutonium scrap in a machining process to the transfer of a fissionable liquid from a vessel of one shape to another. We might try to handle these risks as an organizational problem: more and better training for operatives about the importance of handling nuclear materials according to established protocols, and effective supervision and oversight to ensure that the protocols are observed on a regular basis. But it is also possible to design the material processes within a nuclear plant in a way that makes unintended criticality virtually impossible — for example, by storing radioactive solutions in containers that simply cannot be brought into close proximity with each other.Nancy Leveson is a national expert on defining and applying principles of system safety. Her book Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety is a thorough treatment of her thinking about this subject. She offers a handful of compelling reasons for believing that safety is a system-level characteristic that requires a systems approach: the fast pace of technological change, reduced ability to learn from experience, the changing nature of accidents, new types of hazards, increasing complexity and coupling, decreasing tolerance for single accidents, difficulty in selecting priorities and making tradeoffs , more complex relationships between humans and automation, and changing regulatory and public view of safety (kl 130 ff.). Particularly important in this list is the comment about complexity and coupling: “The operation of some systems is so complex that it defies the understanding of all but a few experts, and sometimes even they have incomplete information about the system’s potential behavior” (kl 137). Given the fact that safety and accidents are products of whole systems, she is critical of the accident methodology generally applied to serious industrial, aerospace, and chemical accidents. This methodology involves tracing the series of events that led to the outcome, and identifying one or more events as the critical cause of the accident. However, she writes:

In general, event-based models are poor at representing systemic accident factors such as structural deficiencies in the organization, management decision making, and flaws in the safety culture of the or industry. An accident model should encourage a broad view of accident mechanisms that expands the investigation beyond the proximate evens.A narrow focus on technological components and pure engineering activities or a similar narrow focus on operator errors may lead to ignoring some of the most important factors in terms of preventing future accidents. (kl 452)

Here is a definition of system safety offered later in ESW in her discussion of the emergence of the concept within the defense and aerospace fields in the 1960s:

System Safety … is a subdiscipline of system engineering. It was created at the same time and for the same reasons. The defense community tried using the standard safety engineering techniques on their complex new systems, but the limitations became clear when interface and component interaction problems went unnoticed until it was too late, resulting in many losses and near misses. When these early aerospace accidents were investigated, the causes of a large percentage of them were traced to deficiencies in design, operations, and management. Clearly, big changes were needed. System engineering along with its subdiscipline, System Safety, were developed to tackle these problems. (kl 1007)

Here Leveson mixes system design and organizational dysfunctions as system-level causes of accidents. But much of her work in this book and her earlier Safeware: System Safety and Computers gives extensive attention to the design faults and component interactions that lead to accidents — what we might call system safety in the narrow or technical sense.

A systems engineering approach to safety starts with the basic assumption that some properties of systems, in this case safety, can only be treated adequately in the context of the social and technical system as a whole. A basic assumption of systems engineering is that optimization of individual components or subsystems will not in general lead to a system optimum; in fact, improvement of a particular subsystem may actually worsen the overall system performance because of complex, nonlinear interactions among the components. (kl 1007)

Overall, then, it seems clear that Leveson believes that both organizational features and technical system characteristics are part of the systems that created the possibility for accidents like Bhopal, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. Her own accident model designed to help identify causes of accidents, STAMP (Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes) emphasizes both kinds of system properties.

Using this new causality model … changes the emphasis in system safety from preventing failures to enforcing behavioral safety constraints. Component failure accidents are still included, but or conception of causality is extended to include component interaction accidents. Safety is reformulated as a control problem rather than a reliability problem. (kl 1062)

In this framework, understanding why an accident occurred requires determining why the control was ineffective. Preventing future accidents requires shifting from a focus on preventing failures to the broader goal of designing and implementing controls that will enforce the necessary constraints. (kl 1084)

Leveson’s brief analysis of the Bhopal disaster in 1984 (kl 384 ff.) emphasizes the organizational dysfunctions that led to the accident — and that were completely ignored by the Indian state’s accident investigation of the accident: out-of-service gauges, alarm deficiencies, inadequate response to prior safety audits, shortage of oxygen masks, failure to inform the police or surrounding community of the accident, and an environment of cost cutting that impaired maintenance and staffing. “When all the factors, including indirect and systemic ones, are considered, it becomes clear that the maintenance worker was, in fact, only a minor and somewhat irrelevant player in the loss. Instead, degradation in the safety margin occurred over time and without any particular single decision to do so but simply as a series of decisions that moved the plant slowly toward a situation where any slight error would lead to a major accident” (kl 447).

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An issue which is of concern to anyone who receives treatment in a hospital is the topic of patient safety. How likely is it that there will be a serious mistake in treatment — wrong-site surgery, incorrect medication or radiation dose, exposure to a hospital-acquired infection? The current evidence is alarming. (Martin Makary et al estimate that over 250,000 deaths per year result from medical mistakes — making medical error now the third leading cause of mortality in the United States (link).) And when these events occur, where should we look for assigning responsibility — at the individual providers, at the systems that have been implemented for patient care, at the regulatory agencies responsible for overseeing patient safety?

Medical accidents commonly demonstrate a complex interaction of factors, from the individual provider to the technologies in use to failures of regulation and oversight. We can look at a hospital as a place where caring professionals do their best to improve the health of their patients while scrupulously avoiding errors. Or we can look at it as an intricate system involving the recording and dissemination of information about patients; the administration of procedures to patients (surgery, medication, radiation therapy). In this sense a hospital is similar to a factory with multiple intersecting locations of activity. Finally, we can look at it as an organization — a system of division of labor, cooperation, and supervision by large numbers of staff whose joint efforts lead to health and accidents alike. Obviously each of these perspectives is partially correct. Doctors, nurses, and technicians are carefully and extensively trained to diagnose and treat their patients. The technology of the hospital — the digital patient record system, the devices that administer drugs, the surgical robots — can be designed better or worse from a safety point of view. And the social organization of the hospital can be effective and safe, or it can be dysfunctional and unsafe. So all three aspects are relevant both to safe operations and the possibility of chronic lack of safety.

So how should we analyze the phenomenon of patient safety? What factors can be identified that distinguish high safety hospitals from low safety? What lessons can be learned from the study of accidents and mistakes that cumulatively lead to a hospitals patient safety record?

The view that primarily emphasizes expertise and training of individual practitioners is very common in the healthcare industry, and yet this approach is not particularly useful as a basis for improving the safety of healthcare systems. Skill and expertise are necessary conditions for effective medical treatment; but the other two zones of accident space are probably more important for reducing accidents — the design of treatment systems and the organizational features that coordinate the activities of the various individuals within the system.

Dr. James Bagian is a strong advocate for the perspective of treating healthcare institutions as systems. Bagian considers both technical systems characteristics of processes and the organizational forms through which these processes are carried out and monitored. And he is very skilled at teasing out some of the ways in which features of both system and organization lead to avoidable accidents and failures. I recall his description of a safety walkthrough he had done in a major hospital. He said that during the tour he noticed a number of nurses’ stations which were covered with yellow sticky notes. He observed that this is both a symptom and a cause of an accident-prone organization. It means that individual caregivers were obligated to remind themselves of tasks and exceptions that needed to be observed. Far better was to have a set of systems and protocols that made sticky notes unnecessary. Here is the abstract from a short summary article by Bagian on the current state of patient safety:

Abstract

The traditional approach to patient safety in health care has ranged from reticence to outward denial of serious flaws. This undermines the otherwise remarkable advances in technology and information that have characterized the specialty of medical practice. In addition, lessons learned in industries outside health care, such as in aviation, provide opportunities for improvements that successfully reduce mishaps and errors while maintaining a standard of excellence. This is precisely the call in medicine prompted by the 1999 Institute of Medicine report “To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System.” However, to effect these changes, key components of a successful safety system must include: (1) communication, (2) a shift from a posture of reliance on human infallibility (hence “shame and blame”) to checklists that recognize the contribution of the system and account for human limitations, and (3) a cultivation of non-punitive open and/or de-identified/anonymous reporting of safety concerns, including close calls, in addition to adverse events.

(Here is the Institute of Medicine study to which Bagian refers; link.)

Nancy Leveson is an aeronautical and software engineer who has spent most of her career devoted to designing safe systems. Her book Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety is a recent presentation of her theories of systems safety. She applies these approaches to problems of patient safety with several co-authors in “A Systems Approach to Analyzing and Preventing Hospital Adverse Events” (link). Here is the abstract and summary of findings for that article:

Objective:

This study aimed to demonstrate the use of a systems theory-based accident analysis technique in health care applications as a more powerful alternative to the chain-of-event accident models currently underpinning root cause analysis methods.

Method:

A new accident analysis technique, CAST [Causal Analysis based on Systems Theory], is described and illustrated on a set of adverse cardiovascular surgery events at a large medical center. The lessons that can be learned from the analysis are compared with those that can be derived from the typical root cause analysis techniques used today.

Results:

The analysis of the 30 cardiovascular surgery adverse events using CAST revealed the reasons behind unsafe individual behavior, which were related to the design of the system involved and not negligence or incompetence on the part of individuals. With the use of the system-theoretic analysis results, recommendations can be generated to change the context in which decisions are made and thus improve decision making and reduce the risk of an accident.

Conclusions:

The use of a systems-theoretic accident analysis technique can assist in identifying causal factors at all levels of the system without simply assigning blame to either the frontline clinicians or technicians involved. Identification of these causal factors in accidents will help health care systems learn from mistakes and design system-level changes to prevent them in the future.

Crucial in this article is this research group’s effort to identify causes “at all levels of the system without simply assigning blame to either the frontline clinicians or technicians involved”. The key result is this: “The analysis of the 30 cardiovascular surgery adverse events using CAST revealed the reasons behind unsafe individual behavior, which were related to the design of the system involved and not negligence or incompetence on the part of individuals.”

Bagian, Leveson, and others make a crucial point: in order to substantially increase the performance of hospitals and the healthcare system more generally when it comes to patient safety, it will be necessary to extend the focus of safety analysis from individual incidents and agents to the systems and organizations through which these accidents were possible. In other words, attention to systems and organizations is crucial if we are to significantly reduce the frequency of medical and hospital mistakes.

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According to David Halberstam in his outstanding history of the war in Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, a prime cause of disastrous decision-making by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson was an institutional imperative in the Defense Department to come up with a set of facts that conformed to what the President wanted to hear. Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy were among the highest-level miscreants in Halberstam’s account; they were determined to craft an assessment of the situation on the ground in Vietnam that conformed best with their strategic advice to the President.

Ironically, a very similar dynamic led to one of modern China’s greatest disasters, the Great Leap Forward famine in 1959. The Great Helmsman was certain that collective agriculture would be vastly more productive than private agriculture; and following the collectivization of agriculture, party officials in many provinces obliged this assumption by reporting inflated grain statistics throughout 1958 and 1959. The result was a famine that led to at least twenty million excess deaths during a two-year period as the central state shifted resources away from agriculture (Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62).

More mundane examples are available as well. When information about possible sexual harassment in a given department is suppressed because “it won’t look good for the organization” and “the boss will be unhappy”, the organization is on a collision course with serious problems. When concerns about product safety or reliability are suppressed within the organization for similar reasons, the results can be equally damaging, to consumers and to the corporation itself. General Motors, Volkswagen, and Michigan State University all seem to have suffered from these deficiencies of organizational behavior. This is a serious cause of organizational mistakes and failures. It is impossible to make wise decisions — individual or collective — without accurate and truthful information from the field. And yet the knowledge of higher-level executives depends upon the truthful and full reporting of subordinates, who sometimes have career incentives that work against honesty.

So how can this unhappy situation be avoided? Part of the answer has to do with the behavior of the leaders themselves. It is important for leaders to explicitly and implicitly invite the truth — whether it is good news or bad news. Subordinates must be encouraged to be forthcoming and truthful; and bearers of bad news must not be subject to retaliation. Boards of directors, both private and public, need to make clear their own expectations on this score as well: that they expect leading executives to invite and welcome truthful reporting, and that they expect individuals throughout the organization to provide truthful reporting. A culture of honesty and transparency is a powerful antidote to the disease of fabrications to please the boss.

Anonymous hotlines and formal protection of whistle-blowers are other institutional arrangements that lead to greater honesty and transparency within an organization. These avenues have the advantage of being largely outside the control of the upper executives, and therefore can serve as a somewhat independent check on dishonest reporting.

A reliable practice of accountability is also a deterrent to dishonest or partial reporting within an organization. The truth eventually comes out — whether about sexual harassment, about hidden defects in a product, or about workplace safety failures. When boards of directors and organizational policies make it clear that there will be negative consequences for dishonest behavior, this gives an ongoing incentive of prudence for individuals to honor their duties of honesty within the organization.

This topic falls within the broader question of how individual behavior throughout an organization has the potential for giving rise to important failures that harm the public and harm the organization itself.

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When we think of the issues of health and safety that exist in a modern complex economy, it is impossible to imagine that these social goods will be produced in sufficient quantity and quality by market forces alone. Safety and health hazards are typically regarded as “externalities” by private companies — if they can be “dumped” on the public without cost, this is good for the profitability of the company. And state regulation is the appropriate remedy for this tendency of a market-based economy to chronically produce hazards and harms, whether in the form of environmental pollution, unsafe foods and drugs, or unsafe industrial processes. David Moss and John Cisternino’s New Perspectives on Regulation provides some genuinely important perspectives on the role and effectiveness of government regulation in an epoch which has been shaped by virulent efforts to reduce or eliminate regulations on private activity. This volume is a report from the Tobin Project.

It is poignant to read the optimism that the editors and contributors have — in 2009 — about the resurgence of support for government regulation. The financial crisis of 2008 had stimulated a vigorous round of regulation of financial institutions, and most of the contributors took this as a harbinger of a fresh public support for regulation more generally. Of course events have shown this confidence to be sadly mistaken; the dismantling of Federal regulatory regimes by the Trump administration threatens to take the country back to the period described by Upton Sinclair in the early part of the prior century. But what this demonstrates is the great importance of the Tobin Project. We need to build a public understanding and consensus around the unavoidable necessity of effective and pervasive regulatory regimes in environment, health, product safety, and industrial safety.

Here is how Mitchell Weiss, Executive Director of the Tobin Project, describes the project culminating in this volume:

To this end, in the fall of 2008 the Tobin Project approached leading scholars in the social sciences with an unusual request: we asked them to think about the topic of economic regulation and share key insights from their fields in a manner that would be accessible to both policymakers and the public. Because we were concerned that a conventional literature survey might obscure as much as it revealed, we asked instead that the writers provide a broad sketch of the most promising research in their fields pertaining to regulation; that they identify guiding principles for policymakers wherever possible; that they animate these principles with concrete policy proposals; and, in general, that they keep academic language and footnotes to a minimum. (5)

The lead essay is provided by Joseph Stiglitz, who looks more closely than previous decades of economists had done at the real consequences of market failure. Stiglitz puts the point about market failure very crisply:

Only under certain ideal circumstances may individuals, acting on their own, obtain “pareto efficient” outcomes, that is, situations in which no one can be made better off without making another worse off. These individuals involved must be rational and well informed, and must operate in competitive market- places that encompass a full range of insurance and credit markets. In the absence of these ideal circumstances, there exist government interventions that can potentially increase societal efficiency and/or equity. (11)

And regulation is unpopular — with the businesses, landowners, and other powerful agents whose actions are constrained.

By its nature, a regulation restricts an individual or firm from doing what it otherwise would have done. Those whose behavior is so restricted may complain about, say, their loss of profits and potential adverse effects on innovation. But the purpose of government intervention is to address potential consequences that go beyond the parties directly involved, in situations in which private profit is not a good measure of social impact. Appropriate regulation may even advance welfare-enhancing innovations. (13)

Stiglitz pays attention to the pervasive problem of “regulatory capture”:

The current system has made regulatory capture too easy. The voices of those who have benefited from lax regulation are strong; the perspectives of the investment community have been well represented. Among those whose perspectives need to be better represented are the laborers whose jobs would be lost by macro-mismanagement, and the pension holders whose pension funds would be eviscerated by excessive risk taking.

One of the arguments for a financial products safety commission, which would assess the efficacy and risks of new products and ascertain appropriate usage, is that it would have a clear mandate, and be staffed by people whose only concern would be protecting the safety and efficacy of the products being sold. It would be focused on the interests of the ordinary consumer and investors, not the interests of the financial institutions selling the products. (18)

It is very interesting to read Stiglitz’s essay with attention to the economic focus he offers. His examples all come from the financial industry — the risk at hand in 2008-2009. But the arguments apply equally profoundly to manufacturing, the pharmaceutical and food industries, energy industries, farming and ranching, and the for-profit education sector. At the same time the institutional details are different, and an essay on this subject with a focus on nuclear or chemical plants would probably identify a different set of institutional barriers to effective regulation.

Also particularly interesting is the contribution by Michael Barr, Eldar Shafir, and Sendhil Mullainathan on how behavioral perspectives on “rational action” can lead to more effective regulatory regimes. This essay pays close attention to the findings of experimental economics and behavioral economics, and the deviations from “pure economic rationality” that are pervasive in ordinary economic decision making. These features of decision-making are likely to be relevant to the effectiveness of a regulatory regime as well. Further, it suggests important areas of consumer behavior that are particularly subject to exploitative practices by financial companies — creating a new need for regulation of these kinds of practices. Here is how they summarize their approach:

We propose a different approach to regulation. Whereas the classical perspective assumes that people generally know what is important and knowable, plan with insight and patience, and carry out their plans with wisdom and self-control, the central gist of the behavioral perspective is that people often fail to know and understand things that matter; that they misperceive, misallocate, and fail to carry out their intended plans; and that the context in which people function has great impact on their behavior, and, consequently, merits careful attention and constructive work. In our framework, successful regulation requires integrating this richer view of human behavior with our understanding of markets. Firms will operate on the contour de ned by this psychology and will respond strategically to regulations. As we describe above, because firms have a great deal of latitude in issue framing, product design, and so on, they have the capacity to a affect behavior and circumvent or pervert regulatory constraints. Ironically, firms’ capacity to do so is enhanced by their interaction with “behavioral” consumers (as opposed to the hypothetically rational actors of neoclassical economic theory), since so many of the things a regulator would find very hard to control (for example, frames, design, complexity, etc.) can greatly influence consumers’ behavior. e challenge of behaviorally informed regulation, therefore, is to be well designed and insightful both about human behavior and about the behaviors that firms are likely to exhibit in response to both consumer behavior and regulation. (55)

The contributions to this volume are very suggestive with regard to the issues of product safety, manufacturing safety, food and drug safety, and the like which constitute the larger core of the need for regulatory regimes. And the challenges faced in the areas of financial regulation discussed here are likely to be found to be illuminating in other sectors as well.

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How can industries involving processes that create large risks of harm for individuals or populations be modified so they are more capable of detecting and eliminating the precursors of harmful accidents? How can nuclear accidents, aviation crashes, chemical plant explosions, and medical errors be reduced, given that each of these activities involves large bureaucratic organizations conducting complex operations and with substantial inter-system linkages? How can organizations be reformed to enhance safety and to minimize the likelihood of harmful accidents?

One of the lessons learned from the Challenger space shuttle disaster is the importance of a strongly empowered safety officer in organizations that deal in high-risk activities. This means the creation of a position dedicated to ensuring safe operations that falls outside the normal chain of command. The idea is that the normal decision-making hierarchy of a large organization has a built-in tendency to maintain production schedules and avoid costly delays. In other words, there is a built-in incentive to treat safety issues with lower priority than most people would expect.

This approach is productive because empowering a safety officer creates a different set of interests in the management of a risky process. The safety officer’s interest is in safety, whereas other decision makers are concerned about revenues and costs, public relations, reputation, and other instrumental goods. So a dedicated safety officer is empowered to raise safety concerns that other officers might be hesitant to raise. Ordinary bureaucratic incentives may lead to underestimating risks or concealing faults; so lowering the accident rate requires giving some individuals the incentive and power to act effectively to reduce risks.

Similar findings have emerged in the study of medical and hospital errors. It has been recognized that high-risk activities are made less risky by empowering all members of the team to call a halt in an activity when they perceive a safety issue. When all members of the surgical team are empowered to halt a procedure when they note an apparent error, serious operating-room errors are reduced. (Here is a report from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on surgical patient safety; link. And here is a 1999 National Academy report on medical error; link.)

The effectiveness of a team-based approach to safety depends on one central fact. There is a high level of expertise embodied in the staff operating a surgical suite, an engineering laboratory, or a drug manufacturing facility. By empowering these individuals to stop a procedure when they judge there is an unrecognized error in play, this greatly extend the amount of embodied knowledge involved in a process. The surgeon, the commanding officer, or the lab director is no longer the sole expert whose judgments count.

But it also seems clear that these innovations don’t work equally well in all circumstances. Take nuclear power plant operations. In Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima James Mahaffey documents multiple examples of nuclear accidents that resulted from the efforts of mid-level workers to address an emerging problem in an improvised way. In the case of nuclear power plant safety, it appears that the best prescription for safety is to insist on rigid adherence to pre-established protocols. In this case the function of a safety officer is to monitor operations to ensure protocol conformance — not to exercise independent judgment about the best way to respond to an unfavorable reactor event.

It is in fact an interesting exercise to try to identify the kinds of operations in which these innovations are likely to be effective.

Here is a fascinating interview in Slate with Jim Bagian, a former astronaut, one-time director of the Veteran Administration’s National Center for Patient Safety, and distinguished safety expert; link. Bagian emphasizes the importance of taking a system-based approach to safety. Rather than focusing on finding blame for specific individuals whose actions led to an accident, Bagian emphasizes the importance of tracing back to the institutional, organizational, or logistic background of the accident. What can be changed in the process — of delivering medications to patients, of fueling a rocket, or of moving nuclear solutions around in a laboratory — that make the likelihood of an accident substantially lower?

The safety principles involved here seem fairly simple: cultivate a culture in which errors and near-misses are reported and investigated without blame; empower individuals within risky processes to halt the process if their expertise and experience indicates the possibility of a significant risky error; create individuals within organizations whose interests are defined in terms of the identification and resolution of unsafe practices or conditions; and share information about safety within the industry and with the public.

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This site addresses a series of topics in the philosophy of social science. What is involved in "understanding society"? The blog is an experiment in thinking, one idea at a time. Look at it as a dynamic web-based monograph on the philosophy of social science and some foundational issues about the nature of the social world.

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DANIEL LITTLE'S PROFILE

I am a philosopher of social science with a strong interest in Asia. I have written books on social explanation, Marx, late imperial China, the philosophy of history, and the ethics of economic development. Topics having to do with racial justice in the United States have become increasingly important to me in recent years. All these topics involve the complexities of social life and social change. I have come to see that understanding social processes is in many ways more difficult than understanding the natural world. Take the traditional dichotomy between structure and agency as an example. It turns out that social actions and social structures are reciprocal and inseparable. As Marx believed, “people make their own histories, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.” So we cannot draw a sharp separation between social structure and social agency. I think philosophers need to interact seriously and extensively with working social researchers and theorists if they are to be able to help achieve a better understanding the social world.